Updated: Living in Godless America
Welcome, apparently, to Godless America. One of the unremarked-upon quirks of GW Bush's State of the Union speech last night was the disappearance of God from the text's closing.Other than a paraphrased quote about Dikembe Mutombo, the word "God" doesn't appear in the 2007 State of the Union speech. In every other Bush-delivered State of the Union speech, dating back to 2001, Bush has always closed the speech with some variant on "May God bless America", but that ending phraseology didn't make the cut this year. (As an aside, the most God-filled SoU speech was in 2003, when the Big Guy showed up 4 times, three of them in a closing flurry.)
In a Presidency as conscious of its constituencies as any in modern history, that can't have been an accidental omission.
[via the NY Times' nifty SoU text analyzer]
[Update] Interestingly, I have had pointed out to me that the original White House transcript ends with "God bless", but the NY Times transcript doesn't have it, nor does the CBS Marketwatch transcript that I scanned earlier.
Bring on Matt Drudge! Liberal media bias ;-) !
1
